Chapter Text
November 1st, 1981 is a cold night, and a chilly morning. Petunia opens the door for the newspaper and the milk, and finds with them, a baby. In another world, Petunia glosses over the part of the letter that warns about the dark wizards coming for her nephew. She lets her disdain brush away her paranoia when the letter insists that she’ll be protected by taking in the boy.
But Petunia has always been a paranoid person. In another life, she holds herself and her family to a level of normalcy beyond scrutiny. She spies on her neighbours to make sure that she’s better than them, that they have no reason to think her and her family odd or abnormal.
In this world, Petunia will still do all of those things. But in this world, Petunia remembers that she has never trusted magic. Not even when she begged to have some, nor when Lily’s professor had come to their house insisting everything was safe and secure.
And now, Petunia has even further proof: her sister and that awful freak she married are both dead along with all of their many friends. They must be, for the boy to have ended up on her doorstep.
He’s been forgotten, abandoned, because magic people care no more for orphans than the non-magical, but at least her sort of people have the decency to set up a good system. Normal people don’t go about abandoning endangered babies on the front step of a house without even ringing the doorbell. In the middle of a rather chilly fall no less.
She frowns at the sleeping bundle on her kitchen table. Petunia is trying very hard to be normal, and she doesn’t need her sister’s freak son to shatter everything she’s built.
She’s a new mother, and they’ve only lived in Privet Drive for a few years. She doesn’t want to be the talk of any unseemly gossip, and she doesn’t want to imagine the rumours they might start about her.
She doesn’t want awful untrustworthy magic coming into her perfect life, but this baby has been thrust into her arms regardless of her wishes, and she knows there’s no getting rid of him now.
Petunia doesn’t want to keep the boy, but she already knows the sort of tricks magical people can do. If she doesn’t accept the boy into her care, those freaks will find a way to force her into it. They might turn her and her family into mindless puppets to care for the boy, or they might warp their thoughts and minds until they thought they’d agreed to it all on their own, and even that they actually loved the freakish magic.
Still, Petunia may suffer the boy to live under her roof and come into her care, but she will not let him ruin everything she’s built. She is a normal woman with a normal family and a very normal life.
It is, she defends as she clears out the cupboard under the stairs and puts together a little bedroom for the boy there, a good protection for the boy too.
She doesn’t trust whatever magic has been put over him to actually protect them, they hadn’t even given any details and she knows that magic is finicky at best. They learn to turn needles from matches, not something more useless like a blade of grass or a twig. And magic is never permanent.
What better protection is there for both the boy and for her family than for no one to know he’s even here. Not the neighbours, not the freaks trying to hunt down a baby, and not anyone else who might come looking for him either.
He is a quiet baby at least, easily shushed.
She feeds the boy when she feeds Dudley, but otherwise she leaves him alone in the cupboard. She doesn’t need anyone peeping through the windows to see him living in her house.
The boys grow older, and despite her own grumblings, Petunia finds that she’s a lucky woman, in as much as a woman saddled with caring for her dead freak sister’s son can be lucky.
The boy is quiet. She worried she’d need to pad the walls and door of his cupboard in case he ever cried while she had company over. She’d been prepared to be the eccentric sort of woman who insisted on having both lunch and tea in the garden regardless of the season. But the boy is quiet. He doesn’t scream or cry anywhere near as much as her dear Dudley does, another sign of his freakishness but at least this time it’s favourable. She isn’t sure what she’d have done if he had cried and screamed from the cupboard at all hours. She wouldn’t have taken him in her arms like she does Dudley, but it would have been dreadful.
She dresses him in Dudley’s cast offs, glad she needn’t buy new clothes for him, and she gives him a few of Dudley’s old broken toys to keep him occupied.
Dudley begins trying to speak soon, babbling and shouting, and the boy doesn’t. Perhaps she ought to be concerned, but she’s only relieved. She’s doubly relieved when Dudley moves on to real words and suddenly has an opinion about everything. Now that Dudley speaks, he demands all sorts of things, and Petunia hasn’t got the energy to give in to the wishes of two toddlers. Not that she would spoil her sister’s son, but she also hasn’t got the energy to shut up the boy and care for Dudley like a good mother.
If she must care for the boy, at least he’s unobtrusive.
Vernon often forgets the boy even exists, and Petunia can admit she’s quietly relieved of that too. She doesn’t like to remember her freak sister, and she likes even less when Vernon remembers it. She worries sometimes that he thinks she’s a freak just by association, or blood, that maybe he thinks she might have infected Dudley with it too.
Petunia knows better, she knows with complete certainty she hasn’t got any of that freaky magic in her, that Dudley is clean of it too. But she worries still that Vernon hadn’t believed her when she’d reassured him.
The boy is slow, she decides, when he first starts babbling after Dudley’s already turned two. She’s finally got Dudley down for his nap, and she’s taking the opportunity to feed the freak while she prepares a roast for dinner.
“Ba.”
“Shht.” She snaps idly, glancing over her shoulder to make sure he’s still strapped in Dudley’s high chair, and that the kitchen curtains are still firmly shut. “Quiet.”
She turns to spoon another mouthful into him when she’s finished tying off the cord around the roast.
“Don’t speak, boy.” She tells him, giving him another spoon before she turns back to the dish. “You must be quiet.”
“Asp.” He says instead.
“Quiet.” She orders. If he wakes Dudley from his nap, she’ll put him back in the cupboard without the rest of his lunch, she decides.
“Pafoo.” He repeats. And she turns to feed him again, because he can’t speak when his mouth is full. Not that that ever stopped her precious Dudley, Dudley would scream if he liked and nothing could stop him, but the boy is a freak. He isn’t much like Dudley.
“Shh.” She presses her finger to her lips, and then to his when her own shushing doesn’t seem to work. He looks up at her with big green eyes, the awful red scar still stark against his skin.
Dudley is three when the freak outgrows his cupboard. Not literally, but he’s finally grown strong enough to have a great deal of energy, a benchmark that Dudley had hit before he’d learned to speak.
When Dudley has this sort of energy, she sets him loose in the backyard, or directs him to one of his many toys to play with. Sometimes, she takes him to the park, or organises play-dates for him with the children of Vernon’s coworkers, or the few neighbourhood children.
Petunia can’t do any of that for her nephew, though, even if she would. He’s not to leave the house, and he’s not to be seen.
She plants bushes in the back garden and wonders if they’ll grow tall enough to hide the yard from anyone looking out of the neighbours’ upper windows. She plants a second row inside the first, determined that the boy will have a sort of tunnel outside to crawl through once they’ve grown. Boys need outdoors, and she can’t keep him inside the house forever. Now that he’s largely given up on speaking, she won’t need to worry as much.
Still, the bushes haven’t even begun to grow to the necessary size yet, and she needs something to keep him occupied. If he’s got the energy, he can learn to make himself useful.
She closes all the curtains in the house, just in case something goes terribly wrong, and she has the boy stand on a chair in front of the counter. She teaches him to cook.
She starts with simple things, like making sandwiches, mixing batter, kneading dough, before she moves on to more complicated things. If it were Dudley in the freak’s place, she’d be worried he’d hurt himself with the sharp knives or the stove, but the boy is, well, a freak. She has never needed to seriously worry about him, except in conjunction with someone seeing him. She’s not about to start worrying for him.
Of course, the boy can’t speak, so she has to keep a close eye on him and everything he does, and a couple times she has to slap him away from messing up something. But for all that he is a bit slow, he learns well enough.
With Dudley’s fourth birthday comes the reminder that he’ll soon be starting primary school. And with that realization comes more worry.
The boy won’t be starting primary school with Dudley, that would be preposterous, but Dudley will be in a setting where she can’t watch over him and make sure that he never mentions him. What if he tells a teacher about the boy, and the teacher believes him and investigates? Petunia can’t have that.
So Petunia implements an impulsive strategy in a stroke of genius that she’ll be quietly proud of for years.
The boy has a name, but they’ve never bothered to use it, so she doubts he knows it. Even if he does, he doesn’t speak to tell anyone. So she convinces Vernon to take her to an animal shelter, and then another, and then another until she finds what she’s looking for. She plays the part of a wife feeling pity at the sight of a cat with one eye scarred over, and Vernon plays the part of a husband who loves her too much to disagree with her choice.
They name the cat Scar, and they name the boy Scar too.
Anyone Dudley tells about Scar the boy will assume he’s speaking of Scar the cat, and as Scar the cat won’t answer to his name anyway, being a cat, whenever she calls for Scar it’s the boy who comes.
It takes a while for the boy to answer to a name he’s never had before, and one also given to a new cat, but she explains that it’s all a big plot to trick anyone hunting him into believing he isn’t here. He goes along well enough.
Scar the boy has grown used to understanding that there are people hunting for him and he needs to hide, he can never be seen.
Dudley goes off to primary school and she doesn’t get any inquiries about an extra boy.
That brings its own challenge: if the boy isn’t learning at primary school, he’s got to learn at home. Petunia hasn’t got the time for it, or frankly, the will or energy. She realises too quickly that learning to read is something done aloud, and she has no intention of encouraging him to speak now that she’s got him quiet.
She teaches him his letters and numbers through cooking, R for Rosemary, O for Oregano, C for Chicken, but largely he doesn’t need it.
He learns faster to recognise everything by sight or smell without the need for labels, and he memorises recipes just by hearing and doing. Maybe not needing maths and reading has given his brain extra room for the actual tasks he needs, but by the time he’s seven, he’s as good a cook as Petunia.
By the time he’s seven, Petunia knows for certain that he’s a freak like his parents, not that she’d much doubted it. He’s like Lily, who made flowers sprout and bloom completely out of season, except that he’s smarter, more useful, than his mother.
He’s levitating heavy pots out of the cabinets and stirring spoons without his hands. He’s repairing dishes and cleaning up spills with a wave of a hand, and Petunia can’t bring herself to try and beat it out of him.
He hides all on his own whenever someone walks by the house and he closes the curtains to keep himself out of sight. What does it matter if he’s using magic when no one’s there to see it but her?
Oh, she knows better than to trust its efficiency, but he’s not doing anything she couldn’t do with her hands. There isn’t any harm.
The house is a well-oiled machine between her and the boy, but she mostly lets the kitchen remain his domain. It’s right across from the cupboard and the easiest place he can dart to if someone comes knocking.
He helps with the cleaning, and sometimes with the gardening, where he can from his tunnel beneath the bushes, but mostly he stays in the kitchen.
She wonders, as his eleventh birthday comes closer and closer, if they’ll come for him like they came for Lily. If they’ll come for the orphan they abandoned on her doorstep like they came for his mother or if they expect him to find his way there all on his own.
She wonders if she ought to let him go, into the world when those freaks are surely still hunting him when he’s only ten, or if it wouldn’t be safer just to keep him here.
That professor had insisted that Lily needed to attend so she wouldn’t lose control of her powers, but the boy isn’t like his mother, wild and unkempt. He’s obedient and intelligent and careful. Maybe he wouldn’t even need it.